Meet the WHCD paparazzi

Times are changing for the celebrity-centric photographers trying to snap celebrities at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner’s glitzy events this weekend.

While the election of President Barack Obama has brought a noted increase in the number of bold-faced Hollywood names descending upon the District — with the possibility of more on the way in 2016 if Hillary Clinton wins the White House — it has come with a growing difficulty in photographing them, says one paparazzo.

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Mark Wilkins, a freelance photographer whose photos have appeared in People magazine and Us Weekly and who will be snapping away this weekend, noted that the annual Bloomberg and Vanity Fair afterparty is one of the weekend’s most star-studded events, but don’t expect to see him hanging around outside and hoping to grab pictures.

“You used to be able to stand right there, you’d get people walking. Now they put you across the street, barricades,” Wilkins said, adding that he covers the MSNBC afterparty instead where there’s easier access.

Wilkins says that’s typical of the kind of increased hassles facing guys like him who are just trying to make a living.

“Bradley Cooper, when he came to the State Dinner [in February], they took him out on the tarmac. They took him down the plane’s steps into a United Airlines van and then they drove him out to the Marriott Hotel, so he didn’t even have to walk through the airport,” Wilkins said. “That just happened in the past two years, they started getting escorted out or snuck out.”

Nevertheless, Wilkins and a handful of colleagues are gearing up as the White House Correspondents’ Association prepares to mark its 100th anniversary Saturday at the Washington Hilton where everyone from the president and lawmakers will rub shoulders with some of the entertainment industry’s elite.

For Wilkins, he said the weekend starts with covering the Creative Coalition party on Friday and then the popular Tammy Haddad brunch on Saturday morning.

“It used to be really easy when it was at her house, but now it’s a little bit harder,” Wilkins said of the event that now takes place at the Beall-Washington House in northwest D.C. “Security’s got a lot tighter at these functions.”

Wilkins, who used to be a limo driver before switching to photography about 5 years ago, said he might “hang out at couple of restaurants, couple of hotels getting people going to lunch” before getting prepped for the dinner’s red carpet.

Kris Connor, a D.C. native who considers himself a celebrity political photographer rather than “paparazzi,” said he’s “always kind of had my foot in the political realm of photojournalism,” but fell into the celebrity side in 2008 when an agency asked him to cover actress Hayden Panettiere on the Hill.

It was around that time — following Obama’s election — celebrities started to up their political game, Connor said.

“I will say probably in the last six to eight years, celebrities have become more savvy in knowing how to work, how to operate, within the political system,” he said.

And the photographers said they hope that the growing trend of “Hollywood in Washington” continues. As two people who have a stake in who’s elected, they say if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were to win the White House, it could be good for business indeed.

“Now there’s a chance there’s going to be a first woman president coming,” Wilkins said, adding that a Clinton presidency would attract more celebrities “than a Jeb Bush president.”

Connor echoed Wilkins’s comments.

“We do look at things like that because it also kind of in a sense will affect our business. The amount of events per week or in the year, will they go down? Will they increase?” Connor said.

But well before 2016 comes one of the city’s biggest weekends, when many in D.C. will put the politicking aside for partying or perhaps do both together.

“We kind of joke around and call it our Oscar’s,” Connor said.

Both men have a strategy to handling the weekend, which includes dozens of events that kicked off Thursday and continue right through Sunday.

“I do know that there are some photographers out there that jump between parties, I’m usually not that guy,” Connor said, who will shoot the WHCD for a wire service and is always hired in an official capacity by PR firms and hosts to cover their events.

Both Connor and Wilkins said they plan to cover the red carpet as guests head into the Hilton for the dinner. There’s always a good chance of capturing a few star-studded moments — like when Wilkins shot actors Ginnifer Goodwin and Josh Dallas being dropped off on Connecticut Avenue.

“A couple of years ago, at one of the afterparties I photographed Kim Kardashian, she was pretty cool,” Connor said. “She knows how to work the camera and give you the poses that you want. She’s kind of almost on automode where you don’t have to go, ‘Give me over the shoulder, give me this.’ She’s kind of like boom, boom, boom.”

Like other Washingtonians hopping from scene to scene, the weekend can be “a big blur” for the men.

“At the end of it, you kind of sit back, and you’re like, ‘What the hell happened?’” Connor said.